News broke this morning that a dark-morph Booted eagle had been seen two days ago on a work volunteer party by Alan Lewis https://www.birdguides.com/articles/rarity-finders-booted-eagle-in-the-chilterns/ and it had been refound again a few miles away by Chris Heard today.It was to late to travel down,so I made arrangements to meet Dan pointon in the morning.
Having missed the pale-morph Booted Eagle in Cornwall a few weeks ago I hoped this bird was still about in the morning.https://saturdaycatbird.blogspot.com/2024/10/booted-it-for-booted-but-no-sign.html
I met up with Dan just after 7.00am and we drove to the east of Warburg NR where the Booted eagle had been original found,finder Alan Lewis was already on site looking.A good number of Red Kites and Common Buzzards were seen but little else.
We headed towards Remenham Hill next and pulled up in a layby looking over where the bird had been seen yesterday,there were so many Red Kites in the area we had already counted over a seventy birds before 9.00am.Just after 9.30am we were looking north towards Remenham Hill when Dan called out,ive got it,I managed to get on it but it was constantly being mobbed by Red kites and as Dan rang the bird out to other birders the Booted Eagle went down into the woodland.Ash Howe,Simon King and James Hanlon had now turned up as they were only down the road and it wasent long before the Booted Eagle came out of the woodland and headed towards us being mobbed by Corvids.
Booted Eagle (C)Simon King
We all got great views of the bird before it eventually headed back towards the hillside and went down again,what a bird and we were so lucky how close it flew towards us.
We headed over the other side of the Thames after this to try and get more views of the bird but it was picked up flying east over Henley,so we only managed distant scope views.
A dark-morph Booted Eagle in Cornwall in May this year was the first to be photographed in Britain since the famous pale morph that was present in Ireland and then Britain between February 1999 and June 2000 that still languishes in Category D of the British list.The Chilterns bird is very likely to be the dark morph seen in Cornwall in May 2024, which was seen with the annual Red Kite influx into that county and has tagged onto a group of Kites as they returned to the Chilterns,the latter area is so underwatched it seems possible that it could have been there all summer.
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